Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Crunchy granola alert: Butterflies may be GMOs

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

File:A small cup of coffee.JPG Ah yes ,the time of year in many parts of North America when, everywhere you look, there is a Monarch (an orange butterfly) flap gliding around. They migrate in vast masses from mid-north Canada to Mexico.

Now, from New Scientist:

Wasps first turned bracoviruses into biological weapons around 100 million years ago. There are now thousands of species of braconid wasp, each of which parasitises a specific butterfly or moth and produces a unique bracovirus carrying a set of genes that is different to those of other wasp species.

But sometimes things go awry. Wasps occasionally lay an egg in the wrong host, for instance, in which case the wasp larva may not survive. In such cases, if genes from the bracoviruses get integrated into the genome of developing egg or sperm cells in the caterpillar, they can be passed down to its offspring. And if any of those genes prove useful, they can become a permanent part of the genome of the butterfly or moth species.

Drezen’s team has shown that this has happened on several occasions. They have found DNA derived from wasps in silkworms, two kinds of armyworm moths and the monarch butterfly. In the monarch’s case, the gene transfer seems to have happened around 5 million years ago.More.

See also: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more

and

Metamorphosis:

Darwinists are stuck at the level of “explaining” metamorphosis, the creature’s total-destruction-recreation life cycle, never mind its community life, strictly as an outcome of their theory – natural selection acting on random mutations – and there they will remain.

Comments

Leave a Reply